EXTENSION® HealthAlert™Clinical Workflow Solutions

NEC Corporation of Americanecam.com

Overview

At a Glance

EXTENSION’s suite of solutions unites the various clinical information systems in a medical environment to deliver alerts, messages, and other time-sensitive notifications to clinicians resulting in improved patient care.

• Greater Patient Care - Improves the patient experience

and clinical outcomes by enhancing communication

between patients and clinical staff

• Increases Nurse-Patient Face-Time - Clinicians receive

alerts and notifications directly on their preferred mobile

device whenever, wherever

• Greater Patient Satisfaction & Scores - Patients can easily

communicate with clinical staff and receive timely

attention in a quiet healing environment

• Improves Staff Satisfaction - Easy-to-use communication

tools that require little training, and dramatically improve

clinical and operational workflows

• Reduces Overhead Noise - Eliminates disruptive noises in

the healing environment, decreases alarm fatigue,

reduces the length of time a patient stays, and improves

the quality of care

• Secure Communications - Protected Health Information

(PHI) is encrypted in transit, fully logged, auditable, and

require user authentication.

• Improves Patient Throughput & Revenue - Improves

clinical workflows and staff efficiencies to reduce overall

costs

What is EXTENSION HealthAlert?

Healthcare professionals are largely mobile and require communication

tools that allow them to move about freely without worrying that they

might miss a critical alert, or other patient need. In addition, instant

access to data enables providers to more effectively manage their time

and resources as they serve several patients simultaneously.

These communication requirements can be a challenge for most

healthcare organizations which include acute care, ambulatory and

assisted living communities. From disparate systems that don’t talk to

each other to healthcare workers having to go to where the information

is instead of having it come directly to them, these are just some of the

issues that they face.

The Solution

Additionally, in a recent report from the Joint Commission on Quality

and Safety, Improving America’s Hospitals, inadequate communication

between care providers, or between care providers and patients/

families, is cited as the root cause of most sentinel events.

With NEC’s Clinical Workflow Solutions from EXTENSION,

INC., healthcare organizations are empowered with enhanced

communication tools that instantly connect providers along the

care continuum. HealthAlert unites the disparate clinical information

systems in a medical environment to deliver alerts, messages, and

other time-sensitive notifications to healthcare professionals on their

preferred receiving device. In addition to intelligent alerting, HealthAlert

instantly connects healthcare professionals to each other and to

patients which positively impacts staff satisfaction and quality of care.

HealthAlert’s core features include:

• Critical Lab Result

• Nurse Call Integration

• Report Availability Notifications

• STAT and Non-STAT Order Notifications

• Staff Assignment

• Device Messaging

Why Choose EXTENSION HealthAlert?

HealthAlert enables clinicians to access patient data from any location

on their mobile device to aid in faster, more effective care. Patient data

retrieved from the hospital’s Electronic Medical Records (EMR), or other

clinical information system populates alerts and notifications with context

- empowering healthcare professionals with the information necessary

to act appropriately. In addition, HealthAlert’s device-inclusive platform

allows clinical staff members to easily communicate in a healthcare

environment where multiple devices are used for multiple purposes.

Clinicians are no longer confined to a PC to retrieve critical information,

such as lab results, STAT orders, and radiology reports. HealthAlert

delivers automatic alerts to recipients and offers ‘hot key’ response

options to accept or decline an alert, view a patient’s chart, auto-dial the

lab, or take further action with the touch of a button.

Enhanced Alerting Features:

• Prioritization - Automatically assigns priorities to incoming alerts

based on client-defined rules.

• Escalation - Automatically escalates alerts to appropriate care

provider when original alerts are not responded to within a given

period of time.

• Verbalization - Announces the type of incoming alert to the recipient,

which reduces alarm fatigue and prevents disruption of other tasks.

• Auditing - Ensures staff accountability, which improves productivity

and efficiency, and helps meet compliancy standards.

How Does Workflow-Driven Messaging Improve Outcomes?

HealthAlert resolves a number of common clinical workflow challenges

that healthcare organizations face every day. It provides a means for

nurses, physicians and clinicians to receive important clinical information

event notifications on his or her wireless phone or Smartphone. By

speeding up the delivery of information and communications, it helps to

improve the overall delivery of care and patient outcomes. HealthAlert is

also HIPAA and HITECH compliant to ensure secure, non-SMS text-

based messaging.

Nurse Call Integration

HealthAlert integrates with a number of common nurse call systems to

enhance communication between patients and staff. It receives standard

pillow speaker, wall button, and code alerts that are then combined

with relevant patient data from various clinical and hospital information

systems. The resulting data-rich notifications are sent to nurses on their

IP phones, Smartphones, and wearable communication badges, which

empowers nurses with information regardless of their physical location.

Nurse Call IntegrationCombines alerts from nurse call systems with EHR/CIS

and ADT or other clinical data, and sends notifications to

HealthAlert-supported devices

Automatic Nurse Call

Patient Data from HIS/EHR]

Improved communication workflows empower healthcare professionals

with more control over their time and resources, reduce costs, and

increase staff confidence and patient satisfaction.

Critical Lab Result Notifications

The critical lab notification feature aggregates data from the Clinical

Information System (CIS)/Electronic Health Record (EHR), lab

system, and ADT to include relevant patient information, and delivers

contextually-rich lab alerts to the designated recipient. Caregivers

are capable of communicating directly with the lab department

via HealthAlert’s one-touch auto-dial functionality, fostering a true

enterprise communication experience. Upon acceptance of a lab value

notification, the alert response can be recorded in the hospital’s clinical

systems to help meet Joint Commission patient safety requirements for

reporting critical lab values. Immediate notification of critical lab values

enables clinicians to act quickly – improving quality of care, as well as

patient and staff satisfaction.

Critical lab Result NotificationSends critical lab values automatically to a HealthAlert-supported

device and enables instant communications with the lab

View Results and Normal Range Alerts

]

Critical Alerts Generated with Contextual Data

Auto-Dial to Instantly Connect to the Lab

]

Report Availability NotificationsSends full radiology, cardiology, surgical, consult and pathology

reports to a HealthAlert-supported device

Report Type

Patient Data from HIS/EHR

Screen Scrolls for Report Detail

]

Report Availability Notifications

A physician cares for multiple patients – oftentimes from multiple

locations – and needs to be notified when important information for

any one of them is made available. HealthAlert provides physicians

with automatic notifications when a radiology, cardiology, surgical,

consult or pathology report becomes available on their IP wireless

phone, Smartphones and tablets. Recipients are empowered to view

the full report immediately – right at their fingertips – on the device

of their choice. The report detail is combined with relevant patient

data from the HIS/EHR and provides the physician with context to

effectively determine the appropriate course of action. Physicians can

receive full reports from any location inside or outside the walls of the

hospital.

Automatic notifications enhanced with relevant patient data enable

physicians to act immediately and save time by instantly connecting

them with relevant departments resulting in improved staff productivity

and patient satisfaction.

STAT and Non-STAT Order Notifications

HealthAlert’s STAT and non-STAT Order notification feature instantly

alerts a nurse when either a STAT or non-STAT order has been

placed that may require action. Quick communication of STAT order

information significantly enhances workflows resulting in faster

response times by clinical staff and a higher quality of care for patients.

Staff Assignment via Mobile Device

HealthAlert offers staff-assignment functionality from VoIP phones

and Smartphones. As staff members arrive for their shifts, they login

to their mobile device to authenticate their identity and designate

their room assignments remotely. With this advanced functionality,

assignment updates can be made quickly and care providers can

easily determine who the appropriate contacts are for a particular

patient. Additionally, persons responsible for updating assignments

for other staff members can easily make changes from a user-friendly

web interface.

This powerful feature allows nurses to add or remove themselves

from an assignment via their mobile device without going through

the unit clerk at their shift change. Nurses can begin their shift duties

immediately and easily communicate with the right staff members

about patients, which results in a higher quality of care, as well as

patient and staff satisfaction.

Staff AssignmentStaff assignment for individuals or groups via mobile devices or

user-friendly web interface

Report Type

Connect with Other Caregivers Instantly

Update Assignments Remotely

]

Device Messaging

HealthAlert’s Device Messaging enables individuals and groups to

send and receive HIPAA-compliant, non-SMS text-based messages

to or from a web browser, VoIP phones and Smartphones. It quietly

connects users in the hospital’s communications network and those

outside of the facility’s campus to ensure critical information is

delivered quickly regardless of the recipient’s location.

This powerful feature allows various types of messaging – individual

and group messaging, pre-defined and custom messaging, as well

as interactive messaging and response options. Clinical texts are

delivered securely, data is encrypted in transit, and user authentication

is required. Staff are pleased with a less distractive alternative to

paging, and patients recover faster in a quiet healing environment.

Device MessagingSends pre-defined and custom HIPAA-compliant text-based

messages between HealthAlert-supported devices including

Smartphones and IP phones, and web browsers

Easily Connect with Colleagues

Interactive Response Options

Pre-Defined Message

65% of nurses surveyed spent more than 20 minutes to more than 1 hour per day trying to reach other medical staff

Forrester Consulting

The inefficiencies of traditional communications methods were highlighted by a recent study comparing wireless voice communications to overhead paging, estimating a potential savings of more than 3,400 hours per year on two

32-patient hospital wards.

Journal of Healthcare Information Management

Provides Seamless Integration with Polycom SpectraLink 8400 Series Wireless Handsets

EXTENSION has integrated its server-based messaging software

platform with the Polycom® SpectraLink® 8400 series wireless

handsets to connect multiple departments and enhance the

enterprise healthcare experience. It sends pre-defined and custom,

HIPAA-compliant text-based messages between the Wi-Fi handset

and other supported devices. Additionally, this integration allows for

individual, group and interactive messaging and marries SpectraLink

8400 Series handsets with Smartphones enabling nurse-to-physician

collaboration from any location.

In addition, EXTENSION unifies corporate VoIP phones with Apple

and Android devices through secure, HIPAA-compliant, text-based

messaging. This allows healthcare systems to fully utilize both Wi-Fi

and Smartphone technologies, which ensures that staff members stay

connected to each other and their patients.

Smartphone adoption in healthcare is rapidly increasing. With

EXTENSION Mobile, organizations can stay on top of trends and more

importantly find comfort in knowing that it protects patient information

in transit to satisfy compliancy standards.

Enables Clinicians to Receive Alerts and Notifications Directly on their Smartphones

EXTENSION Mobile is a feature of the HealthAlert solution suite that

enables healthcare professionals to receive alerts and notifications on

their preferred Smartphone or tablet via a mobile application installed

on their device. The user-friendly applications allow physicians, nurses

and other clinical staff members to stay connected to each other

and patients from any location. The EXTENSION Mobile solution

advances patient care by allowing caregivers to effortlessly send and

receive critical alerts and other notifications on their Apple® iPhone®,

iPod touch®, or Android™ device. Automated communication among

stakeholders providing treatment is integral to improved patient

outcomes, and overall patient and staff satisfaction.

Nurse Call Integration

Critical lab Results Notification

SW12031 | v.09.17.12

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About NEC Corporation of America Headquartered in Irving, Texas, NEC Corporation of America is a leading provider of innovative IT, network and communications products and solutions for service carriers, Fortune 1000 and SMB businesses across multiple vertical industries, including Healthcare, Government, Education and Hospitality. NEC Corporation of America delivers one of the industry’s broadest portfolios of technology solutions and professional services, including unified communications, wireless, voice and data, managed services, server and storage infrastructure, optical network systems, microwave radio communications and biometric security. NEC Corporation of America is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NEC Corporation, a global technology leader with operations in 30 countries and more than $38.5 billion in revenues. For more information, please visit necam.com.

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Corporate Headquarters (Japan)NEC Corporationnec.com

Oceania (Australia)NEC Australia Pty Ltdnec.com.au

North America (USA & Canada)NEC Corporation of Americanecam.com

Asia NEC Corporationnec.com

How is EXTENSION Different?

EXTENSION enables the dynamic flow of information, aggregates data

based on a healthcare facility’s requested needs, and delivers the alert

to an appropriate staff member on their mobile device. EXTENSION

is an intelligent communication and workflow tool that goes beyond

simply pushing data to a device. A key differentiator is EXTENSION’s

ability to parse HL7 data and act upon the information in a targeted

way. The EXTENSION system is both an event and data-driven

technology that sends context-rich notifications equipping clinicians

with the right information at the right time on the right device. For the

clinical user, this means enhanced workflows that significantly reduce

the time spent at a PC gathering patient data to determine next steps

when a critical alert is triggered.

EXTENSION’s architecture is a server-based appliance independently

built for the sole purpose of aggregating relevant healthcare data and

acting upon rules-based workflows. EXTENSION does not require

the addition of multiple legacy interfaces to achieve interoperability

between disparate clinical information systems (EMR, Nurse Call,

Bed Management, etc.) and mobile devices because it achieves it via

standard protocols.

This server-based clinical alerting software platform was designed with

simplicity in mind, but with advanced functionality to improve the daily

lives of its users. The clean and simple framework and user-friendly

interface allow clinicians to be laser-focused on patient care and

outcomes – not the technology that runs behind the scenes.

Key Components:

• Utilizes common protocols and data formats such as HL7, TAP,

SOAP and REST to integrate systems

• Extensible by uploading new interfaces while the system is active

• Interfaces with VoIP phones, Smartphones and communication

badges

• Simple web browser user interface

• Runs on a self-contained Linux appliance

• User configurable rules, alerts, and display workflows without writing

source code

• Reporting and auditing capabilities

Improving communication is not only a significant goal on its own, but the relationship to healthcare quality, patient safety, informed consent and other topics should make it a critical priority in every healthcare organization.

American Medical Association